In Bad Company, and other Stories/In the Bloom of the Year
IN THE BLOOM OF THE YEAR
The first week of December! And seeing that we are in the realm of Australia, in the district of Riverina, where the season has been wet, which is 'dry country' English for triumphantly prosperous, also that vegetable growth is at its acme, we regard our title as fully justified.
All plant-life is now profusely, riotously luxuriant. A drenching winter, following a wet autumn, preceded a late, showery spring; thus, and because of which, the pastures and cornfields, the orchards and gardens, are rich with verdure and promise to a degree unknown since the proverbial year of 1870.
Some few sultry days have we had, but the true Australian summer has not, so far, appeared in its lurid, wasting splendour. Hardly a ripening tinge is yet visible on the wide-waving prairies, the bespangled meadows, the shaded forest lawns. Wild flowers of every shape and hue—blue and scarlet, pink and orange, white and yellow, perfumed or scentless—glorify the landscape.
As we drive along, this balmy, breezy, sun-bright day, through the champaign, which lies anear and around an inland country town, let us (if haply it may tend to dispel some small portion of the ignorance of our British friends as to the 'bush of Australia') put on record the 'scenes and sounds of a far clime' in this season of the year.
The wheat crops, standing strong and level for leagues around, as high, generally, as the rail fence which protects them, have not as yet been assailed; but the reaper and binder has made many a foray into the hayfields. Here we notice one of the results of machinery. In the majority of instances the oats, though green of hue, are in sheaves and stocks. The time-honoured spring romance of fragrant haycocks is hastening to its doom, inasmuch as the greater portion of the oat-crop saved is intended to be reduced into chaff, as being more portable or saleable in that form. It is obviously better economy, by using the reaper and string-binder, to have it arranged mechanically in sheaves and hand-placed in stocks. It is then more convenient for loading, stacking, and the final operation of the chaff-cutter. Most of these sheaves are six feet and over in height. Heavy-headed, too, withal. We were informed that four tons of chaff to the acre is not an uncommon yield this year. The lambs, which are running with their mothers in the great enclosures, wire-fenced and ring-barked as to timber, through which the high road passes, are wonderfully well-grown and healthy-looking. The percentage, averaging from eighty to ninety, is exceptionally high, when it is considered that the expense of tendance is nominal. From five to seven thousand ewes—even more sometimes—are running in each paddock, unwatched and untended till marking-time, thence to the shearing, which is also the weaning period. This year the shepherd-kings have a right royal time of it, though not more than sufficient to compensate them for the losses and crosses of the last decade. Apropos of this woolly people, here approaches an aged shepherd. He is mounted, so that he has received his cheque. Solvent and resolved, he is journeying to the town, on pleasure bent, of a rational nature let us hope. The flies of mid-day are troublesome, but he has a net-veil round his weather-beaten face; so has the steady veteran steed. The collie, following dutifully, is unprotected from flies, but accoutred with a wire muzzle—not, as the young lady from the city supposed, to prevent his biting the sheep, but lest he should swallow the innocent-seeming morsel of meat by the wayside, intended for vagrom canines, and containing the deadly crystals of strychnine. Certes, with plenteousness the land runs o'er, this gracious year of our Lord 1887. The cattle lounging about the roads—the roads, like the fields, knee-deep in thick green grass—with their shining coats and plump bodies, testify to the bounty of the season. The birds call and twitter. The skylark, faint reflex as he is of his English compeer, yet mounts skyward and sings his shorter lay rejoicingly. The wild-duck, gladsome and unharmed, swims in the meres which here and there divide the river meadows. The fat beeves in the paddock ruminate contemplatively, or recline around some patriarchal tree. All nature is joyous; the animated portion 'rich in spirits and health,' the vegetable contingent spreading forth and burgeoning in unchecked development. As we pass Bungāwannāh, one of the large estates, formerly squattages, which alternate with the farms and smaller pastoral holdings, a fallow doe with her fawn starts up from the long grass, gazing at us with startled but mildly-timid eye. They are outliers from a herd of nearly a hundred, which have increased from a few head placed there by a former proprietor.
In this our Centennial year it must be conceded that Australia is a land of varied products. We pass orchards where the apples are reddening fast, where apricots are turning pink, and the green fig slowly filling its luscious sphere. We note the vivid green of the many-acred vineyards, now in long rows, giving an air of formal regularity to the cultivated portion of the foreground. Then we descry the dark green and gold of an orangery, hard by the river-bank—in this year a most profitable possession to the proprietor.
Amid this abundance we miss one figure sufficiently familiar to the traveller in other lands, or the European resident, viz. 'the poor man.' He may be somewhere about, but we do not encounter him. He does not solicit alms, at any rate. His nearest counterpart is the swagman or pedestrian labourer. He is differentiated from the shearer and the 'rouseabout' (the shearing-shed casual labourer), who travel, the former invariably, the latter occasionally, on horseback. But the humble dependant upon the aristocratic squatter or prosperous farmer is a well-fed, fairly well-dressed personage, who affords himself an unlimited allowance of tobacco. Say that he elects to journey afoot in an equestrian country, he needs pity or charity from no man.
When one thinks of England, with its three hundred souls to the square mile, one cannot but be thankful, in spite of the ignorant, insolent diatribes of the Ben Tillett agitator class, for the condition of the labouring classes in this favoured country. They are at a premium, and will be for years to come, while tens of thousands of acres of arable land are awaiting the hands which shall clear and plant them. Meanwhile, a small annual rent is obtained for the State by means of purely pastoral possession—a form of occupation destined to be surely, if slowly, superseded by agriculture, when demanded by the needs of a more developed epoch and a denser population.
This particular district has for many years been settled after a fashion which permits of moderate -sized holdings. For a lengthened period, therefore, have the exotic trees and shrubs, which even the humblest farms boast, grown and flourished. The tall, columnar poplars, the wavy, tremulous aspens, the umbrageous elms, are large of girth, stately of height, and broad of shade. They are to be seen around the farm-house, or near the mansion which peeps out amid wood and meadow. Here a row of stately elms borders the roadside, affording a grateful shade to the weary wayfarer. The season has been exceptionally humid, as when
Low thunders bring the mellow rain
Which makes thee broad and deep.
Yet the oak is not so common. Slow of growth, he does not seem to assimilate himself to all soils, although in a few localities he may be observed doing no discredit to his British comrades. The lime, the Oriental plane, the ash, the willow, and the sycamore proclaim the generous nature of the soil and climate which they have reached, so far across the foam. Besides these are the noble Paulownia imperialis, majestic with gigantic leaves and purple-scented flowers; the catalpa and even the magnolia, beauteous and fragrant—a botanic miracle. The olive grows rapidly, forgetting oft in eagerness to add branch to branch to mature the fruit, which will one day furnish a valuable export.
All these with others in this last season are spreading their green pennants to the summer breeze—grateful in shade to the traveller wearied and adust; beautiful to the eye of the lover of all plant-life; 'things of beauty and of joy for ever,' even to those whose sense of harmonious landscape -arrangement is rudimentary and undeveloped.
We halt for an instant on the verdant level, hard by the little creek whose waters, this gracious year, run yet with musical monotone, to watch the drivers of these high-piled waggons, who are even now unloosing their teams. There are five waggons, which, with wheels of the adamantine iron-bark eucalyptus, are warranted to carry the heaviest loads procurable; and heavy loads they are. Forty bales of wool in each, or thereabouts. Sixty or seventy horses in the five teams, all 'grade' Clydesdales or Suffolks, and averaging in value from £25 to £35 each. The 200 bales of wool are worth, say at £20 each, £4000; £1500 for the team horses; £300 for the waggons. A not inconsiderable total of values. Stay! In haste we have forgotten the sixty sets of harness and the tarpaulins,—£5000 or £6000 in all. A large property to be in the hands of five young fellows hardly known to the proprietor of the freight. It is fortunate that there are no robber barons at this time of day to demand tribute, or land pirates and buccaneers, except those who collect the inter-colonial protective duties.
The hare which runs across the road in front of us is an introduced, imported animal, like the deer we saw a while back. He is becoming numerous, but, unlike his cousin and comrade, 'Brer Rabbit,' has not been disastrously destructive. The settlers eat him at present. 'Brer Rabbit' in some districts has commenced to reverse the process.
Among the manifold natural beauties of the season we must by no means omit the hedgerows; in beauteous blossom these, and though, perhaps, chiefly too wild and luxuriant, yet affording pleasing contrast to the bare utilitarianism of rail and wire fence, and the monotony of the barked, murdered woods. Various are they, ranging from the dark green of the hawthorn, lovely with sweet souvenir bloom of long-past English springs, to the pink flower-masses of the quince, the crimson showers of the rose-hedges, and the yellow hair of the Acacia armata; while high, towering, thorny, impervious, with brightest glittering greenery, grows the Osage orange—a transatlantic importation, which in some respects is the most effective green wall known, being a species of live barbed wire, with an agreeable appearance of leafage, yet exuding a bitter juice, which prevents its mutilation by live stock. All these, interspersed occasionally with the sweetbriar, the scent and wild-rose flower of which almost atone for its predatory habits, its illegal occupation of Crown Lands. In one instance an economical or patriotic farmer had permitted the fast-growing eucalyptus saplings to interlace his 'drop' fence—an effective and not wholly unpicturesque road border.
From time to time amid the larger enclosures we came across a half-forlorn, half-picturesque patch 'where once a garden smiled.' A roofless cottage, a score of elms and poplars, with straggling rose-bushes abloom among the thistles, mark the abandoned homestead. In the 'distressful country' these would be the signs of an eviction. Here, when Michael or Patrick unhouses himself, he does so with a comfortable cheque in his pocket and the wherewithal to 'take up' a larger holding, perhaps six hundred and forty acres, or even in the central district, two thousand five hundred, by the payment in cash to the Crown—of how much does the reader unlearned in the New South Wales land laws believe? Two shillings per acre! The remaining balance of eighteen shillings per acre to be paid in twenty years, with interest at five per cent. or ninepence per acre annually! The neighbouring landholder has bought out honest Pat or Donald, or François or Wilhelm, as the case may be—several nationalities being here represented—giving him a handsome profit in cash for his labour and outlay. The fences are then pulled down, the roof falls in, the elms, the poplars, with a few peach-trees and roses, alone remain to tell the tale of the deserted homestead. As we pass one of these, a grand cloth-of-gold bush, six feet and more in height, hanging over a fence, tempts us with its fragrant clusters. We choose a lovely bud and an opening flower, with its curiously-blended shades of gold and faintest pink, and, much moralising, go our way.
In the good old days, when there was no salvation outside of vast pastoral holdings, when small freeholds were considered not only inexpedient but immoral, this was held to be a waterless region, unfit for the habitation of man, away from the river frontage. Now near every farm appears a dam or other successful method of conserving water. The homesteads, too, are well built, and substantial for the most part, standing in neatly-kept gardens and fruitful orchards. Milch kine graze in the fields or stroll about the grassy roadways, sleek-skinned, well-bred, and profitable-looking.
No indications save those of comfortable living and easygoing rural prosperity present themselves. Buggies or tax-carts with active horses, driven mostly by farmers' wives or daughters, trot briskly along the high-road to the town, going to or returning from their marketing. Occasionally a girl on horseback canters by, sometimes escorted, often without cavalier or attendant. The road-maintenance man jogs by in his covered cart, filling up ruts with metal here and there, or clearing a drain where the storm-water runs too impetuously. In all this savage land which I have described in detail, there are no lions or tigers, no bushrangers, no Indians. In fact, but for a few varieties of vegetation, one might fancy oneself back again in rural England.